In the meantime, Microsoft made quite some changes and implemented a view new features which I have used now for a bit and want to write about them. And of course, the still existing bugs they don’t care about.
So, let’s get started.

The Birthday Bug:
First of all, Microsoft already (after – how long does the Outlook-Connector exists? – a decade) managed to solve the Birthday Bug with the introduction of the new outlook.com calendar. It looks and feels now pretty similar to the Windows 8 metro calendar and actually no longer features the Birthday-Menace. BUT, Microsoft sure cannot just fix bugs without bringing another easteregg into play. And since they have years of experience in how to make a calendar suck at birthdays, they decided to make use of their knowledge and implement a new Birthday Bug. What happens is, that for no reason some (native outlook.com) contacts WITH a valid birthday entered in their details, does not show up in your birthday calendar. No matter, how often you set/unset the birthday, delete/create the birthday calendar or delete/recreate the entire contact. Some contacts simply won’t show up. And that’s happen with the native, standalone, unlinked outlook.com contacts! You don’t want to know what happens if you’ve got some linked contacts with, let’s say a Twitter, outlook, Google and Skype account. Then you are really screwed! In this case, Microsoft Answers suggest, to unlink all accounts and try to delete/recreate your birthday calendar in 24h circles, until you can see all your birthdays. WTF?!
Another nice thing is, that if you have an outlook.com contact, that is linked to a Skype account, the birthday calendar won’t say “Birthday of Name Lastname”, but instead it uses the Skype USERNAME, which we all know is fucked up cryptic shit for the most of us. Can you associate all your Skype contacts USERNAMES with their real names? I cannot! And this bug drives me nuts! Of course, I could just unlink the Skype account from the outlook.com contact, but that would mean, than I have a multitude of contacts that have two entries in my address book, which is, frankly, no option.
The worst thing about this bug is, that you have to manually check, which contact appears in the birthday calendar and which are missing.

The Group Calendar:
With the new Skydrive in outlook.com, Microsoft made it possible to setup groups. A group is a bunch of people who share a group-email-address and a group-calendar, and can easily share files via Skydrive. Sounds good, but Microsoft also thought of a way to screw it up. Especially at this particular component, where their coders can really shine with: the calendar. So, what they have made is, that if I try to setup an appointment in the teams calendar and want to invite other people who are not in this group the calendar belongs to, outlook.com tells me, that I have to be the groups owner to do so and cancels my action. Funny thing, considering that I am the very fucking owner of the group.

The Timezone Stuff:
After many complains, this, and the birthday annoyance got fixed now by Microsoft. Your emails now show the correct time.

Less lucky you are, when you’ve hoped contact pictures or a decent search for your emails arrived over the last month. Contacts are still faceless and the search sucks hard since day one. The Twitter integration is also still not working. At least not the ways I think it should, after reading the description. It just says, it cannot find me on Twitter.

The All New Crap:Microsoft wouldn’t be Microsoft, if they would not make it as obvious as possible, that they give a shit about the users, their problems and bugs that annoy them.
They just keep showing their complete disregard for fixing critical bugs, but instead building new, useless and buggy features, that no one needs or asked for.
A very nice example for this is the new “Archive”-function in outlook.com that is now a big button right in the top menu bar.
What it does? Well, in theory it takes all selected emails and moves them to a preselected folder; an archive for example. This is meant to happen with a single click. WOW! WHAT A FEATURE! :shocked:
Well, I really don’t see why the world needs this, since we all just drag and drop mails from here to there where we want them, but I thought, I give it a try. So I watched a video and read an article about how this feature works and how to handle it. It seemed quite easy; select email(s), press “Archive”, select (or setup a new) folder in the dialog box, done.
But what happened is this:
I selected a few emails, pressed the “Archive”-button and *plop* all the selected mails disappeared.
Wow! That was awesome!
But wait, did I select a folder where to move the mails? Huh?
There was no freaking window asking me for a f… FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!WHERE ARE MY MAILS!?
I tried the search and even the marvelous “advanced search”, but I couldn’t find my mails anymore. They’ve just became shredded. Even looking manually through all the folders, I couldn’t find them. outlook.com just deleted them. Completely.
WTF?!
I setup an incident with Microsoft answers and tried to reproduce the behavior. I selected some mails again, pressed “Archive”, *plop*, Wow, WTF,…
And again, no message window, no folder to select, but the mails vanished from my inbox. But this time only some of them went completely lost. Some other were moved to an custom folder that I’ve created long time ago, but for another purpose.
Trying it again, more mails were moved to the custom folder. So I renamed this folder and tried once again. Guess what, there was still no dialog asking me for a destination folder, but the mails were now moved to just another custom folder I once setup. ???
I then deleted all my custom folders, and tried once more. And suddenly a message box popped up, asking me where to put those mails. I created a new “Archive” folder, and *plop*, all selected mails went there. I recreated my other custom folders, tried again, …, it works. Mails are moved to the right place.
But why do I have to pay such a high price, losing some important mails, for a stupid feature like that?
I should have knew it, that everything new is just everything new that bothers me; at least when it comes from Microsoft‘s outlook.com experts.
Is there a way to reset the “Archive” folder, in case I want to change it? I couldn’t find any options so far. Maybe we just have to delete anything else and/or go through some shitty experience (including loss of mails) to find out ourselves.

What this all amounts to is, that today outlook.com is no better than ten month ago. It’s still crappy, full of bugs and annoyances. Plus it got slower.
So, stay away from it until Microsoft shows some efforts to fix it. Unless you want to beta-test bugs, have a way too low blood pressure or you intend to die soon anyway.

Over the last days I had to suffer from severe KV-annoyances whilst grinding XP to make some progress in my pathetic VK 20.01 (D).
Trying to not go nuts and run amok, I had a few revenge sessions with my bloodthirsty VK 36.01 (H).
In an extraordinary good run I almost killed 10 enemies (two kills were stolen from me by a mean Hummel only fractions of a second before I could finish them off)

But this is what you KV pilots get for your snootiness!

3x KV-1
2x KV-1S
The rest were only fillers to keep me entertained while I was waiting for the KV’s to come in range. :tongue:

Over the weekend I stressed my nerves to make some progress with my Tier VII Pz.Kpfw. VI Tiger. But somehow it turned out, that there are only morons and top-notch idiots around, that – to complete my misery – are always in my team, often leading us to a 5-15 defeat. Or worse. Even folks with Tier IX machinery like the E-75 sometimes act like complete retards ending up dead in less than a minute.
Those goddamn motherfuckers ruin the entire game. And my statistics!
Certainly, I’m not on top of the score chart all the time, but mostly I manage to score at least one to three kills and deal at least the amount of damage, that I have to take myself. This of course becomes quite tricky once you face an IS-8.
Well, it doesn’t took long to annoy me and I decided to start over with a light tank and go up the tech tree to grab one of those sexy high Tier medium tanks; either the E-50 Ausf. M or the Leopard 1 with a slight preference to the E-50, because of its better durability.
However, both tanks are still many hours and even more battles away, and I’m not even close to the point (Pz.Kpfw. III/IV) where to choose.
So, as I mentioned above; I’ve started over from Tier III with the Pz.Kpfw. II Ausf. G, which, frankly was so goddamn cheesy that I drove no more than five battles and went to the next tank.
An even cheesier joke of a tank. Actually a rogue version of a toothpick throwing wheelchair, the Tier IVVK 20.01 (D)This thing is considered a medium tank. I’m really not sure why (maybe because it’s slow?), but it fails in its role. Entirely.
The promised 50km/h are reached only downhill, the armor is not existing and the top gun is probalby meant to do funny sounds and muzzle flashes to entertain your team whilst in static warfare.
I really could live with slow, low armored tanks (like I did with my tank destroyers), but I cannot stand inferior weapons! The ridiculous Tier IV 7,5cm KwK 37 L/24 does a respectable amount of damage (110/110/175 HP) for its Tier. On paper. But in consideration of the matchmaking, which throws you in battles against Tier VI heavies, the penetration of 43/100/38 mm is not just a joke, its malicious and offensive against all VK 20.01 (D) pilots. Even a Tier V medium tank like the Russian T-34 has “all-around” armor thicker than 40mm, not to mention the Tier V and VI heavies. I really don’t know what those retards at WG are thinking. But it seems very likely, that they just needed another prey for the fucked up hordes of KV fanboys. Because this gun does not do ANY damage to any KV.
Sure you can load HE shells and try to hit a KV in the back. Yeah, awesome! It makes between 20-50 HP of damage.
It’s not even possible to destroy a KV’s track with this thing. The tracks just have more HP than this gun can deal. And since tracks now act as spaced armor, the vulnerable body of a KV is completely save from module damage due to HE shelling.
I really, really hate it to see those KV-maggots crawling down the racing line to the enemy base, occasionally shooting (and one-hitting) anything that moves and being completely untouchable unless they meet another heavy. I hate them so much! :angry:
The VK 20.01 (D) will definitely not stay in my garage and I hope I can quickly grind the 10+k XP for the next tank (the Pz.Kpfw. III/IV), without heart attacks and hate eruptions in chat.

And when I’m bored, I occasionally start to do unreasonable things; like grinding teeth or playing World of Tanks again.
Whilst considering my return to the battlefield earlier last week, I thought of trying the new German Tier IV artillery tank, thePz.Sfl. IVbJust to see what they’ve done to the SFLs with 8.6. Well, after a couple of (lost) matches it became quite clear: artillery is no longer meant to be played as it were before. The horrific aim- and projectile-flight time plus the abysmal accuracy in tactical view making it almost impossible to substantially contribute to the course of the battle. Also, the matchmaking seems trying to fuck SPGs by putting them in battles with preferably only light to medium tanks which because of their smaller size and higher mobility, are almost untouchable for a classic arty-strike. The only way I could make use of this tank anyway, was to play this thing as a tank destroyer. Because since you have found a decent ambush position (and actually got there – everything but easy with this super-slow panzer) you can one-hit almost everything of your Tier and below. But you better pick your target wisely, because this one shot you make is probably the first and your last in this battle. As mentioned above, this tank is reloading as fast as it drives; namely not at all. Even the lightest scout will destroy you once you’ve been uncovered.
After all, it’ s completely NO FUN at all to play an artillery unit since 8.6, and I’m sure to not keep or play any of them again.